5G and E-Band Communication Circuits in Deep-Scaled CMOS (eBook)

Marco Vigilante (S’14–M’17) was born in Carpi, Italy, in 1988. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Università di Modena, Modena, Italy, in 2010 and 2012, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium, in 2017. He is currently working as a research assistant at the MICAS laboratories of the KU Leuven in the field of high performance analog building blocks for mm-Wave transceivers designed in deep-scaled CMOS. Mr. Vigilante was the recipient of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award for 2016-2017 and the 2017 IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Award–3rd Place.Patrick Reynaert was born in Wilrijk, Belgium, in 1976. He received the Master of Industrial Sciences in Electronics (ing.) from the Karel de Grote Hogeschool, Antwerpen, Belgium in 1998 and both the Master of Electrical Engineering (ir.) and the Ph.D. in Engineering Science (dr.) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Belgium in 2001 and 2006 respectively. From 2001 to 2006, he was a Teaching and Research Assistant within the MICAS research group of the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), K.U.Leuven, Belgium. While working towards his Ph.D. degree, his main research focus was on CMOS RF power amplifiers and analog circuit design for mobile and wireless communications. From 2001 to 2006, he was also a Lector at ACE-Group T Leuven, Belgium where he taught several undergraduate courses on electronic circuit design. During 2006-2007, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the University of California at Berkeley. At the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, he was working on mm-wave CMOS integrated circuits within the group of Prof. Ali Niknejad. For this research, he received a Francqui Foundation fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation. During the summer of 2007, he was a visiting researcher at Infineon, Villach, Austria where he worked on the linearization of basestation power amplifiers. Since October 2007, he is a Professor at KU Leuven, department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) and a staff member of the ESAT-MICAS research group. His main research interests include mm-wave and sub-THz CMOS circuit design and RF power amplifiers. Patrick Reynaert is a Senior Member of the IEEE and chair of the IEEE SSCS Benelux Chapter. He serves or has served on the technical program committees of several international conferences including the ISSCC-SRP, IEDM, ESSCIRC, RFIC and PRIME. He has served as Associate Editor for TCAS-I and as Guest Editor for JSSC. In 2011, he received the TSMC-Europractice Innovation Award. He is co-recipient of the ESSCIRC-2011 Best Paper Award. In 2014, he received the 2nd prize of the Bell Labs Prize.

Preface 6
Contents 8
1 Introduction 12
1.1 Towards 5G and IoT 12
1.2 mm-Wave Spectrum, Challenges and Opportunities 13
1.3 System Level Requirements for mm-Wave Wireless Links 16
1.3.1 Free Space Loss and Beamforming 17
1.3.2 Impairments Model 18
1.3.3 Link Budget Design Examples 29
1.4 Outline of This Book 32
References 34
2 Gm Stage and Passives in Deep-Scaled CMOS 36
2.1 Gm Stage: MOS as a Transconductor 36
2.1.1 DC Model and Regions of Operation (IDS) 37
2.1.2 AC Model, Gain (gm) and Speed (ft, fMAX) 38
2.1.3 Inversion Coefficient (IC) as a Design Parameter 39
2.1.4 Effect of Scaling 39
2.2 Effect of Scaling on Integrated Passives 41
2.2.1 MOS Transistor as a Switch 41
2.2.2 Capacitors 42
2.2.3 Inductors 42
2.2.4 Transformers 44
2.2.5 Transmission Lines 45
2.3 Conclusion 47
References 47
3 Gain-Bandwidth Enhancement Techniques for mm-Wave Fully-Integrated Amplifiers 49
3.1 RLC Tank 49
3.1.1 RC Low-Pass Filter 49
3.1.2 RLC Band-Pass Filter 50
3.2 Coupled Resonators 51
3.2.1 Bode-Fano Limit 51
3.2.2 Capacitively Coupled Resonators 53
3.2.3 Inductively Coupled Resonators 54
3.2.4 Magnetically Coupled Resonators 55
3.2.5 Magnetically and Capacitively Coupled Resonators 56
3.2.6 Coupled Resonators Comparison 57
3.3 Transformer-Based Resonators 58
3.3.1 On the Parasitic Interwinding Capacitance 58
3.3.2 Effect of Unbalanced Capacitive Terminations 61
3.3.3 Frequency Response Equalization 62
3.3.4 On the Parasitic Magnetic Coupling in Multistage Amplifiers 64
3.3.5 Extension to Impedance Transformation 65
3.3.6 On the kQ Product 66
3.3.7 Transformer-Based Power Dividers 68
3.3.8 Transformer-Based Power Combiners 69
3.4 Conclusion 69
References 70
4 mm-Wave LC VCOs 72
4.1 LC VCOs Basics 73
4.1.1 Negative Gm Model 73
4.1.2 A General Result on Phase Noise 75
4.1.3 More on Flicker Noise Upconversion and 2nd Order Effects 77
4.1.4 Distributed Oscillators 80
4.1.5 FOM and Challenges @mm-Wave 82
4.2 Tuning Extension Techniques 84
4.2.1 Varactors 85
4.2.2 Switched Capacitors 85
4.2.3 Switched Inductors 86
4.2.4 Switched TLs 87
4.2.5 4th Order Tanks and Other Techniques 88
4.3 Design Example: A Dual-Band Transformer-Coupled QVCO in 28nm CMOS 88
4.3.1 Proposed Transformer-Coupled Quadrature VCO 89
4.3.2 Design Considerations at mm-Wave and Circuit Implementation 98
4.3.3 Measurement Results 101
4.3.4 Appendix 105
4.4 Conclusion 107
References 108
5 mm-Wave Dividers 112
5.1 Injection Locking: Operation Principle 113
5.2 High Speed Dividers 115
5.2.1 Injection Locked LC Dividers 115
5.2.2 Current-Mode Logic (CML) Dividers 117
5.3 Design Example: An Ultra-wideband Divide-by-4 in 28nm CMOS 120
5.3.1 Design for Maximum Locking Range and Minimum Power Consumption in the E-Band 121
5.3.2 Measurement Results 122
5.4 Conclusion 126
References 127
6 mm-Wave Broadband Downconverters 129
6.1 Receiver Architectures 129
6.2 Low-Noise Amplifiers Basics 131
6.2.1 Challenges @mm-Wave 131
6.2.2 Most Adopted Circuits 132
6.2.3 Cascode Limitations 136
6.2.4 Neutralized CS Amplifier 137
6.2.5 Broadband Input Match 138
6.3 Downconversion Mixers @mm-Wave 140
6.4 Design Example 1: A Wideband LNA in 28nm CMOS 141
6.4.1 LNA Architecture 141
6.4.2 Measurement Results 143
6.5 Design Example 2: A Wideband Downconverter Front-End in 28nm CMOS 147
6.5.1 Receiver Architecture 147
6.5.2 RF Mixer and Power Splitter 148
6.5.3 If Mixer, Baseband TIA and I/Q Generation 150
6.5.4 Measurement Results 150
6.6 Conclusion 156
References 157
7 mm-Wave Highly-Linear Broadband Power Amplifiers 160
7.1 Power Amplifiers Basics 161
7.1.1 Single Transistor Amplifier Under Large Signal 161
7.1.2 Trade-Offs in PA Design: Po, PAE and Linearity 161
7.1.3 Harmonic Terminations and Switching Amplifiers 163
7.1.4 Challenges @mm-Wave 166
7.2 Class-AB Power Amplifier @mm-Wave 167
7.2.1 Efficiency at Power Back-Off 168
7.2.2 Sources of AM-PM Distortion 170
7.2.3 Distortion Cancellation Techniques 173
7.3 Design Example: A Highly Linear Wideband PA in 28nm CMOS 180
7.3.1 Broadband Impedance Transformation 181
7.3.2 Transformer-Based Output Combiner and Inter-stage Power Divider 183
7.3.3 More on the kQ Product 186
7.3.4 Measurement Results 189
7.3.5 Appendix I 198
7.3.6 Appendix II 199
7.4 Conclusion 199
References 200
8 Conclusion 203
8.1 Summary 203
8.2 Major Contributions 204
8.3 Suggestions for Future Work 205
References 207
Index 209